http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/services/Feed ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:24183 This paper presents the intelligent virtual animals that inhabit Omosa, a virtual learning environment to help secondary school students learn how to conduct scientific inquiry and gain concepts from biology. Omosa supports multiple agents, including animals, plants, and human hunters, which live in groups of varying sizes and in a predator-prey relationship with other agent types (species). In this paper we present our generic agent architecture and the algorithms that drive all animals. We concentrate on two of our animals to present how different parameter values affect their movements and inter/intra-group interactions. Two evaluations studies are included: one to demonstrate the effect of different components of our architecture; another to provide domain expert validation of the animal behavior. 2013-02-18T06:33:29.449Z ]]> http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:24185 We have developed the virtual world of Omosa in which school students can learn what scientists do by doing it themselves. In Omosa students are able to observe, collect data and interact with a number of intelligent virtual human and animal agents. 2013-02-18T06:33:25.403Z ]]> http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:22310 Evaluation is an essential step in the research and development of software, particularly for new technologies such as Virtual Environments. One of the challenges to such evaluation is to collect data needed for analyzing the behavior of the users of the virtual environment. Conventional acquisition of evaluation data is time-consuming and prone to bias. In this paper, we present a taxonomy to assist identification and collection of appropriate variables for automatic data collection. We further show how these variables, such as navigation paths and characters met, can be used to capture the behavioral interaction of learners in a virtual ecosystem and to produce a user-model to evaluate the usability of the world under development. 2012-10-25T23:53:11.093Z ]]> http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:18340 Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed in 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in the future of education and actively changing the direction of their own teaching practice and curricula. 47 academics reporting on 28 Australian higher education institutions present an overview of how they have changed directions through the effective use of virtual worlds for diverse teaching and learning activities such as business scenarios and virtual excursions, role-play simulations, experimentation and language development. The case studies offer insights into the ways in which institutions are continuing to change directions in their teaching to meet changing demands for innovative teaching, learning and research in virtual worlds. This paper highlights the ways in which the authors are using virtual worlds to create opportunities for rich, immersive and authentic activities that would be difficult or not possible to achieve through more traditional approaches. 2012-03-29T21:22:52.392Z ]]> http://www.researchonline.mq.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:17928 This session reports on an ongoing project funded by the Australian Research Council's Discovery initiative that is conducting design research into learning in collaborative virtual worlds (CVW). The session will describe three design components of the project: (a) pedagogical design, (b) technical and graphics design, and (c) learning research design. The perspectives of each design team will be discussed and how the three teams worked together to create the project's CVW. The development of productive failure learning activities for the CVW will be discussed, and there will be an interactive demonstration of the project's CVW. 2012-03-06T02:40:27.379Z ]]>